1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for determining the quality and reliability of electronic components and electronic component containing systems. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method for determining the quality of an individual electronic component or product in the manufacturing line and/or the reliability of the individual electronic component or product in the field, during use, based on its own “healthy” product baseline, which can be obtained during or after manufacture.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic components are integral to the functionality of most products and systems today, and their reliability is often critical to system reliability. There has, therefore, been a growing interest in monitoring the ongoing “health” of individual electronic component products and systems in order to predict failures and provide warning to avoid catastrophic failure. Here, the degree of health of a product is defined as the extent of degradation or deviation of a product's performance from an expected normal aging condition.
Assessing the extent of deviation or degradation from an expected normal operating condition (i.e., health) for electronic products provides information that can be used to meet several critical goals, which include (1) providing advance warning of failures; (2) recording and predicting intermittent product failures and analyzing products returned from the field that, for example, exhibit No Trouble Found (NTF) symptoms; (3) minimizing unscheduled maintenance, extending maintenance cycles, and maintaining product effectiveness through timely repair actions; (4) reducing the life-cycle cost of equipment by decreasing inspection costs, downtime, and inventory; (5) extending the life of existing products; and (6) improving qualification, assisting in the design of new systems, and providing logistical support of fielded and future systems.
In prognostic methods described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,950,773; 7,162,393 and 7,171,586 the healthy baseline for a product is determined with reference to databases containing performance information for similar products. Then, measured performance, signal values and calculated signal parameters are recorded, along with environmental and operational loads, or their correlations for a particular product, and then compared with this healthy baseline to detect anomalies or degradation. However, the disadvantages of this approach are several. First, components inside the electronic products or software/firmware of the products may be changed or updated, requiring re-training in order to establish a new healthy baseline. Second, the healthy baseline will often not be valid if the usage conditions are not sufficiently similar to the training conditions. Third, it is difficult to cover all conditions of use when building the healthy baseline, since user environments and behaviors may vary significantly.
Hence, what is needed is a method that establishes a healthy baseline using data obtained from the product itself. This healthy baseline can be updated as necessary using different testing, operational or environmental conditions. Then, by subsequently recording the performance, signal values, and calculated parameters, environmental and operational loads, and comparing these outputs and their correlations to their own individually generated and updated healthy baseline, it is possible to identify the actual health of the product at any time and to use this data for subsequent health management and prognostic goals.